2011's Madoka Magica is an amazing little anime that plays on your expectations of what a magical girl anime should be and blindsides you with a compelling story filled with twists and turns. The PlayStation Portable game, Madoka Magica Portable, goes a step further.

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It shows you the myriad of ways the tale could have unfolded. For fans of the anime, it is a must play. There is only one problem, however: It has never been released in any language except Japanese. Luckily, a group of fans are working to change that.

The group, called TRADUKO Soft, is a four-person team. The project head “Mystic” serves as the main translator while “Zak” works as a secondary translator. “Evi” handles the programming side and “Snow” the playtesting/proofreading. According to Mystic, all four have worked on translation projects before, but this is their first game.

When asked why they picked Madoka Magica Portable to translate for their first game, Mystic responded, “We've seen translations of the anime, the manga, and the movies, and we noticed that the game had yet to be translated. ... We did this for the fans, and because we enjoy translating.”

Currently, the patch is well on its way to completion. According to Mystic 90% of the game is translated and put into the patch, with only some parts of the story left untranslated.

When completed, the English patch will require an ISO rip of the game to run.

Work on the patch began back in April 2012 and work has continued on and off ever since. If all goes according to plan, Mystic and his team hope to have the game completed sometime in late 2015 or early 2016 with a demo version playable by this August.

To Mystic and his team, quality is their foremost concern. “The reason it is taking so long is that we want to make the translation quality on par with the Mother 3 and FFV translations. We didn't want to just literally translate it, we wanted to give the new characters good names and personalities using writing styles.”

With a large chunk of work already under their belts, the TRADUKO Soft team is quite pleased with its progress so far. “We'd also like to say we're amazed we came this far for such a small team in such short time, and hope to release this game as soon as it's finally done. I think we've done great for our first game translation.”

If the recently posted videos are anything to go by, the patch is looking great so far. To stay current with the patch's progress, check out the TRADUKO Soft Facebook page or theirwebsite which has project updates every week.

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